Eureka! Institutional Repository

In the last twelve years, Greece has been going through one of the most serious economic crises in its history. The political choices of the governments resulted in tax evasion gaining legitimacy in the consciousness of a large part of the citizens. The result of this process is to increase the phenomenon of tax evasion. The application of classical tax auditing methods by the tax authorities could not stop this phenomenon to a satisfactory extent. The Greek Tax Administration, in order to reverse the upward trend of the phenomenon, proceeded to reorganize its mechanisms and mainly introduced a new mentality in tax audits by adopting the saying “follow the money”. For this reason, indirect control techniques were introduced in the tax audits carried out by the IAPR. Along with the change of mentality in tax control, it was realized that globalization has resulted in the free movement of funds, both legal and illegal. An attempt is made to introduce these illegal funds into the legal economic life and in this way to "wash them out". To deal with the phenomenon of money laundering and the financing of terrorism, the latest directive of the European Union and the recommendations of the FATF were incorporated into Greek legislation. The result of this process is the introduction of the due diligence audit carried out by the AADE for certain categories of taxpayers. The purpose of the thesis is the presentation of the two new audit techniques used by the auditors of the Independent Authority Public Revenue (IAPR). These techniques are the indirect audit techniques and the due diligence audit. In addition, through the research carried out using a questionnaire in the tax audit centers (ELKE) of the prefecture of Thessaloniki, a first assessment by the tax auditors of these new control techniques was attempted.